Marc-André Pigeon
Canadian Centre for the Study of Co-operatives
Biography
Marc-André Pigeon is the director of the Canadian Centre for the Study of Co-operatives and an assistant professor in the Johnson Shoyama Graduate School of Public Policy (JSGS). His research interests center around the study of co-operatives, governance, and money and banking. In relation to this line of inquiry, Dr. Pigeon has of late been exploring the intersection of cybernetics, co-operative governance and public policy. Prior to joining the JSGS, Dr. Pigeon worked as the assistant vice president of financial sector policy at the Canadian Credit Union Association, where he was responsible for monitoring, researching and advocating on behalf of credit unions. He has also served as an advisor at the Department of Finance, a lead analyst for two major Parliamentary committees (Senate Banking, Trade and Commerce; House of Commons Finance), an economist at the Levy Economics Institute, and a business reporter for Bloomberg Business News. Dr. Pigeon holds a PhD from Carleton University in mass communications, a master’s degree in economics from the University of Ottawa, and a journalism degree from Carleton University. Dr. Pigeon has served on several non-profit and charitable boards, including the Co-operative Development Foundation (CDF), the Saskatchewan Co-operative Association, and Saskatoon Unitarians. In his spare time, he enjoys all-season camping with his family and their dog Pepsi and volunteering as a mechanic at Bridge City Bicycle Co-operative.
Sessions
Beer’s Pedagogy: Lessons from the Concordia University Lectures
Stafford Beer’s writings have been widely recognized as novel, erudite, profound and influential, shaping decades of contributions from scholars and practitioners alike. They have also been criticized as opaque and difficult to apply, contributing to a tendency for his work to exist on the margins of mainstream academia and management. Beer was sensitive to these critiques. By his own account, he penned Diagnosing the System in part to address these concerns. In it, he provides a step-by-step stripped-down approach to understanding and deploying the viable systems model (VSM) for managers and others interested in how the analytical tool could help with real-world decision-making. In the forward to Diagnosing the System, Beer says the book was inspired and shaped by his experienced co-teaching the VSM in a seminar course offered at Concordia, Montreal, Canada, in 1981-82. He devotes the book to the students of this class, insisting that the book resulted from “my learning.” My contribution will share reflections on what we can learn from Stafford Beer’s approach to pedagogy by analyzing recently digitalized recordings of these lectures. My method is interpretative and is inspired by a second-order cybernetics perspective of a ‘model of the modeler,’ paying close attention to Beer’s pedagogical approach and indications of self-awareness about his pedagogical style. I expect that this analysis will help us understand how we might learn from Beer’s pedagogy and better communicate and teach about the VSM. It will also shed some light on Beer’s time in Canada, a place he would eventually call home until his passing in 2002 and which figured prominently in Diagnosing the System and in other of his later works.